


Hailey Thinks

by Redrikki



Series: Jennifer Hailey, Vampire Slayer [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Crossover, Gen, Post-Chosen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-16
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 01:54:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/pseuds/Redrikki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Lt. Jennifer Hailey ever wanted was to travel the galaxy via a giant piece of alien technology, make some world changing scientific break throughs and show up Major Carter. Too bad destiny had other ideas.  Now she's got superpowers and a whole lot to think about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hailey Thinks About Clichés

Jennifer Hailey realizes she is going to die and finds herself wondering where she would be right now if she had just done the assignment in Professor Monroe’s class. Would she be flying transport planes somewhere? Siting in a lab? Kicked out of the Air Force for punching that cadet? She probably wouldn’t be here watching a goa’uld turn her CO’s brains to mush with a hand device. 

The goa’uld is backing off now to leave Major Castleman twitching on the floor. The snake strolls among the team in an outfit that would be ridiculous if the whole thing weren’t so terrifying. He heads back to the major and launches into a speech about how they are all insolent Tau’ri dogs who would pay and so on and so forth. Hailey has never been on the receiving end of a rant of villainy before, but she has read enough reports and seen enough of the right kind of movies to know how trite it all is. She thinks about Colonel O’Neill’s joke about these and other clichés and has to struggle to hold back what would probably be some fairly hysterical laughter.

*******

It had been one of those routine surveys of an uninhabited planet that turns out to be a lot less routine and a lot more inhabited. The whole capture had been pretty quick; less a fight and more just pathetic. One minute Hailey had been collecting soil samples with Sergeant Doyle standing guard, and the next she had been waking up in a cell with a nasty zat hangover. Their captors had let them stew for a while, and it wasn’t until Major Castleman was taking nominations on which corner would serve as their field toilet that the Jaffa guards came to make them presentable for their master. They were each roughed up a bit before they were fitted with chains and a metal rod which pinned their arms uncomfortably behind their backs and gave the guards something convenient to grab onto. As they were dragged down the gaudy gold corridor Hailey wondered why they hadn’t just been tied up while they were unconscious, and suspected she might, in fact, be panicking a little. 

Now she’s kneeling on the floor of the throne room and knows she is panicking a lot. A bomb she could defuse, a damaged ship she could repair, but here there is nothing she can do but think. The goa’uld is looking over the team to find the weakest link, and he’s probably going to pick her. The bad guys always pick the girl, especially when they’re pretty and short. This one smiles nastily, embraces the cliché and heads on over. Hailey’s mind whirls as he comes closer. He’s going to torture her for the iris codes, they always want that, and she wonders if she can stand strong.

The answer hits her like a solid wave. It washes away the panic, the dread, and the nagging belief that Major Carter would have already thought her way out of this, and leaves behind a sense of awesome strength and righteous wrath. Hailey’s chains snap with a scientifically impossible ease as the soreness of her bruises fade to nothing. She stands as the goa’uld activates his hand device and easily knocks his arm aside.

The look on his face is almost comical. “What is this?” he roars.

Hailey thinks about saying “Your worst nightmare” as she rams the metal rod through his eye, but decides that sounds kind of cliché.


	2. Hailey Thinks About Disasters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hailey thinks about disasters, like the one her career has suddenly become.

It is ironic, Hailey muses, that saving the day is probably going to be the thing that ruins her otherwise promising career. She had been going places, and now her superiors are debating whether or not to ship her off to the NID or dissect her or something equally unpleasant. Major Castleman sits there looking upset and pained, which isn’t too surprising considering the red patch on his forehead left by the goa’uld hand device. The base commander, General Hammond, seems pensive, but every so often he looks at Hailey like he fears she might explode. In contrast, Colonel O’Neill, his second, has spent the briefing fiddling with his pen and actually looks somewhat bored. The base’s CMO, Dr. Fraiser, has just finished informing them that the lieutenant’s blood work is clear and she is goa’uld free. Despite the fact that Hailey already has more needle marks on her arm then a typical junkie, the doctor would like to conduct more tests. Hailey suppresses a groan. Her team may be alive, but this sure has been a disaster of a day.

*****

The thing is, up until the post-mission briefing, everything had been starting to look up. Yes, their gear was gone, but the goa’uld had been using a GDO as an interrogation prop and, once they were finished being surprised, their Jaffa guards had been kind enough to will the team their staff weapons. Even the trip to the stargate had been surprisingly easy. Major Castleman had been a little unsteady, but Sergeant Doyle had kept him going while Hailey and Captain Vlasic dealt with any problems. 

The initial post-mission medical exam hadn’t been that bad either. Admittedly, it had been a bit more thorough than usual on account of all the blood, but the staff had focused most of their efforts towards determining if the Major had any brain damage. It was during the briefing where her day turned south again. The General’s face had remained neutral while the Major told him of their capture, but he began to look alarmed when Vlasic described how little Jenny Hailey had ripped through her chains like they were made of daisies instead of metal and then rammed a steel rod into their captor’s scull. Hammond hadn’t even waited for Doyle to finish recounting how she had pulled the rod back out and started killing Jaffa with it before he ordered an SF to escort her back to the infirmary for further testing. 

Now those tests are done, and yet Dr. Fraiser the vampire still wants more blood. She is convinced that Hailey has been exposed to something, some chemical, some disease, that gave her the strength. She has a look on her face that Hailey has worn herself. This is a mystery and the doctor intends to solve it.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Colonel O’Neill suddenly bursts. “Has anyone considered that she just might be one of those hok’tar super people?”

The other officers stare at him. “Sir...,” Fraiser begins, shaking her head. 

“Come on. The kid’s a certified super genius and her physical skills have always been above and beyond what you’d expect from someone that short.”

“That may be true,” Dr. Fraiser concedes, “but from what her team describes this was beyond even what Teal’c could do.” She pauses while everyone looks suitably impressed. “Something must have triggered that, and that’s what we need to find out.” 

“What about adrenaline?” Major Castleman asks, pinching the bridge of his nose. 

The doctor shakes her head. “I don’t think so. It would have to be something new, and I’m sure Lieutenant Hailey has felt adrenaline before.”

“Yes I have, ma’am, but this was different,” Hailey tells her. “He was going to torture me. I’ve never been that terrified in my life, or that, well, angry.”

Fraiser nods like she’s listening, but then turns to the General. "Sir,” she says, “we’ve seen viruses before that can cause this type of increased strength. At the very least we need to monitor Lieutenant Hailey’s condition in case she begins to experience the same types of symptoms as SG1 did under the influence of Anise’s armbands.”

“Agreed,” says General Hammond with a curt nod of his head. “Lieutenant Hailey, you are not under arrest, but I am going to confine you to the base while Dr. Fraiser continues to monitor your health.”

“Yes, sir,” she responds, relying on military protocol to hide her misery.

The General’s face softens slightly and suddenly he looks like someone’s grandfather instead of just her CO. “Since we don’t know how long this is going to take, you’re going to be staying in one of the VIP rooms.” He gives a quick nod to the SF who will be escorting her and rises. So does everyone else. “Dismissed.”

Hailey goes with her guard to her cushy prison still convinced that her career is over.

*****

Later that evening Hailey will turn on the tv and see a disaster even worse than the one her life has become. The screen will show a large crater rapidly filling in with sea water while the reporter tells her that at this time nearly half of Sunnydale’s 32,900 souls are still unaccounted for. Hailey will think that maybe, in comparison, her life isn’t quite so bad.


	3. Hailey Thinks About Aliens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Normally, Hailey gets along with aliens but she thinks she might want to kill this one.

Hailey is worried about her friend Satterfield. They’re here at O’Malley’s to help her forget about her loser ex-boyfriend, but it seems Satterfield’s dubious taste in men strikes again. They’ve all just met, but Hailey can already tell there is something off about this guy. He’s looks normal: tall and handsome, if a touch too pale. He has no accent and is dressed like everyone else, but there is something indefinably wrong, something alien, about him. Not that Hailey has problems with aliens. After all, she thinks that Nyan guy in the anthro department is kind of cute, but she doesn’t like Satterfield’s new friend. In fact, she kind of feels like killing him.

*****

It had been over a month since the incident on P4X-234, and life was nowhere near as bad as Hailey had initially feared it would be. During her confinement, she read some interesting articles in the _Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics_ , watched the coverage of the Sunnydale earthquake, and played lab rat for Dr. Fraiser. After seven days, nearly 99 percent of Sunnydale’s former residents had turned up alive and well, and Hailey had been subjected to every medical test short of dissection. In the end, Fraiser had been forced to concede that not only was Hailey not under the influence of some strange alien organism, she also did not seem to be suffering any adverse effects. General Hammond lifted her confinement and Hailey practically skipped all the way home. 

Career-wise, everything was almost back to normal. She worked in the lab, went on missions, and did her job. True, there were initially a few people who had stared at her like they expected her to turn green, rip off her clothes and start killing things, but they had eventually cut it out. Her team had taken to calling her Wonder Woman, but considering Captain Vlasic had gotten stuck with the nickname Pickle, Hailey didn’t really mind. The biggest difference was how she felt. On missions it was like her pack was filled with air instead of heavy equipment, and even on the longest hikes she felt like she could walk forever. At night, her watches felt so good she missed them when she was back on earth. 

The thing was, despite what she had lead Dr. Fraiser to believe, the strength had never actually gone away. Major Carter had once estimated that Teal’c was one-and-a-half times stronger than a human his size would be, but Hailey had estimated that she was at least five times stronger than that. She could run really fast too, and had clocked her top speed at 35 miles per hour. It came with a price though. She had to start taking all her meals on base once she realized she would literally eat herself out of house and home if she actually paid for everything she ate instead of just essentials like ice-cream and chocolate. Between the fact she could both eat all that ice-cream without gaining an ounce and lift her couch over her head, Hailey was beginning to think Colonel O’Neill had been onto something when he suggested she might be hok’tar.

At the moment Hailey the hok’tar is sitting at O’Malley’s Bar and Grill trying to suppress the urge to kill her friend’s new squeeze while experimenting with alcohol. Normally, two drinks and she’s tipsy, four and she’s bowing to the porcelain god, but right now she’s on her sixth beer (and second bowl of peanuts) and doesn’t feel a thing. She thinks about challenging the considerably drunker Satterfield to a game of pool, but her friend is nowhere to be seen. She starts to worry when she picks up the sounds of a scuffle and notices that the creepy new boyfriend is missing too. Hailey gets up and begins to search for them. 

She finds them in the back, just past the restrooms. Satterfield is putting up a decent fight, but he has still managed to pin her to the wall by the payphones and appears to be biting her neck. A reddish film of rage descends over Hailey’s eyes as she surges forward and yanks the man off her friend with enough force to send him crashing into the chairs stacked against the opposite wall. She pivots to stand in front of her friend as the man regains his feet. He’s not handsome anymore. His eyes are gold, his face is warped by strange ridges, and his fangs drip with Satterfield’s blood. He looks like a monster.

The alien-monster-man makes a lunge towards Hailey’s right so she, making sure to keep Satterfield behind her, pivots left. Putting her back to a dead end. He sneers as he moves to block the women’s path to the rest of the restaurant and safety. Some unnamed instinct sends Hailey reaching for the upraised leg of one of the chairs stacked nearby. It snaps off in her hands and she holds it before her like she would a knife. Something, maybe surprise, maybe fear, flickers briefly across the alien’s face, and then it’s gone and the sneer is back.

“Slayer,” he snarls and charges at her.

Aim high, Hailey thinks as she breaks his nose. The alien stumbles back, arms flung wide open, and in that instant she slams her broken chair leg into his chest. A look of complete horror floods the alien’s face as, for a few seconds, they are frozen like that. Then the moment is over and there is a whoosh sound as he explodes into dust.

“That guy just turned to dust,” Satterfield points out from behind her.

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Hailey murmurs feeling a bit shell-shocked. Where is the rest of him, she thinks. That pile isn’t anywhere big enough to account for all his mass, not even with the kinetic energy of the explosion. Hailey takes a deep breath and pushes the science aside for the more important question. “What I want to know is how he managed to get through the stargate unnoticed.”

“I don’t think he did.” 

Hailey turns to stare at her friend. 

“I don’t think he was an alien.” Satterfield clutches her bleeding neck with one hand and gestures to the makeshift weapon Hailey is still clutching with the other. “I think he was a vampire.”


	4. Hailey Thinks About Stalkers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hailey thinks someone might be following her.

The whole scenario reminds Hailey of a bad horror movie. The nearest light is on the fritz, buzzing and flickering on and off in the otherwise dark parking lot. It is late and the lot is deserted except for Hailey and her shadow. She can hear his footsteps behind her in the dark as she makes her way to her car. He’s been following her for a while now, days in fact. She sees him at her apartment, buying coffee, out with friends, and it’s getting old. Maybe he’s NID, maybe some random pervert or maybe it’s just coincidence, but either way it’s time to end it. Whoever he is, Hailey knows she can take him. After all, she has superpowers. Hailey turns to confront the man. Too bad it isn’t him.

*****

Hailey had first spotted her stalker a week ago as she stopped for coffee on the way to work. At the time, she hadn’t thought much of him. He was young, kind of cute, and oddly eye-patch wearing, but there was nothing especially suspicious about his behavior. The man hadn’t been leering at women or saying arrr or anything. He was just another guy pouring half a pound of sugar into his coffee and talking on his cell phone.

“I get that they don’t know her name, but you think they could at least have described her to a sketch artist,” the man had been saying as Hailey walked in. “I mean, as haystacks go, 369,815 is pretty–” he broke off abruptly as Hailey brushed past him on her way to order. “Never mind,” he told the person on the other end and hung up his phone. She glanced back and saw the surprise on his face as he stood there holding his phone in one hand and clutching the oddly glowing pendant of his necklace with the other. Hailey could have sworn she felt his eye on her as she ordered, but by the time she’d gotten her Grande Americano, the man was gone.

It turned out he hadn’t gone far. When Hailey left the shop a few minutes later, the man was still in the parking lot and back on his cell phone. His friendly little nod went unacknowledged as she hurried to her car. The team had been scheduled to go to P3B-29J later that morning, and she was eager to get to the office. The M.A.L.P. had shown evidence of some Ancient technology, and Hailey was excited to be spending the next week checking it out. Anticipation pushed everything else out of her head and she forgot about the man before she left the parking lot. 

Unfortunately, Hailey’s chance to play with Ancient technology was cut short when Captain Vlasic managed to break his wrist on their second day off-world. That was why, just three days later, Hailey was back on earth for another run-in with her stalker. This time he was standing by the mailboxes in the lobby of her apartment building when Hailey came down to wait for Satterfield. Her car battery had died while she was away, and her friend had offered to either help her jump it or give her a ride to work. Satterfield was, however, running a little late. Hailey had been so busy looking at her watch and grumbling that she almost missed the man until he approached her. He looked different. He still had the eye-patch and the funny necklace with the glowing stone pendant, but he had lost the flannel and jeans in favor of a rather sharp-looking business suit. 

“Excuse me,” he began, seeming a little nervous. “Um, hi. My name is–” And suddenly Satterfield was there, waving jumper cables and apologizing for being late. It didn’t take too long to jump the battery, but by the time Hailey remembered him, the man had disappeared. 

She saw him next at dinner the following night. The team had been out at O’Malley’s to have a few drinks and poke fun of Vlasic’s clumsiness. Halfway through her steak, Hailey spotted him standing by the door in all his eye-patch-wearing glory. Up until then, she had written off their meetings as coincidence, but that night his remaining eye was fixed squarely on her. The man was clearly following her, she concluded, but why? He could just be a random pervert, but, then again, Hailey did work at a top secret facility. His wide-eyed staring was about as subtle as a brick through the front window, but his seeming lack of professionalism didn’t mean he couldn’t be with the NID or someone just as bad. 

“Do you see that man over there,” she asked Major Castleman.

“Which man where?”

“The one with the eye-patch. He’s right over – damn it!” The man was gone.

The next morning he was at her coffee shop again. This time Hailey managed to spot him at the counter before she went in. She quickly ducked around the corner of the building as adrenaline spiked through her. Had he been laying in wait for her? Hailey craned her neck to study him through the front window. From her position, he looked suspiciously like some one buying coffee. She watched him accept his drink from the barista, take an experimental sip and start to doctor it with sugar. The previous night’s staring and roguish eye-patch aside, the man seemed strikingly normal. Was she just paranoid? Was it all just small world stuff? Did he think she was stalking him?

Hailey considered her options. She could report her suspicions to her superiors, but she might not like the results. When Major Carter claimed to have an uninvited alien houseguest, they had tailed her and put cameras in her house. Hailey, with the superpowers she had lead her superiors to believe were gone, really couldn’t afford that type of surveillance. On the other hand, if the man did turn out to be NID, and she failed to report a potential security threat she could be in big trouble. 

Before she could reach a decision, the man finished sweetening his coffee and headed for the exit. Hailey ducked back into hiding. As he passed her, the pendant of his necklace seemed to briefly glow, but the man never spotted her. Instead he got into a car with California plates. Hailey did her best to memorize them and made a decision. She was going to do some research before she talked to anybody. 

A few hours of research revealed that the car was registered to an A.L. Harris, a Sunnydale refugee with no criminal record. Her google search listed him as foreman for a Sunnydale-based construction firm, and indicated that he had some sort of connection to a store called the Magic Box (the one stop shop for all her occult needs). The senior year photograph Hailey found on a class of ‘99 tribute page showed him with two eyes and looking like a complete dork. On the other hand, he seemed to have a military record too classified even for her. By the time she left work she still hadn’t decided if he was he was a threat or not. 

As it turns out, the question is moot. The person following her through a darkened parking lot isn’t her friendly one-eyed stalker after all; it’s a vampire. He smiles toothsomely at the surprise that no doubt shows on her face and lunges towards her. Hailey recovers quickly from her shock, grabs his arm, and uses the force of his own momentum to ram him head first into the lamppost behind her. The vampire goes down hard and the light finally goes out. Hailey backs off to look for a weapon, but the lot is all metal, concrete and glass with no wood in sight. 

Suddenly, the vampire is up where he should be down. He comes in fast and throws a punch that knocks Hailey to the ground. The vampire at the bar had been a pushover, but this one hits like a Jaffa leaving Hailey momentarily stunned. He bends over her, moving in for the kill, and she kicks him hard in the chest and face. He stumbles back far enough for Hailey to get to her feet, and the two of them stand there, facing off, reassessing and waiting.

“Hey,” says a voice from behind her. Hailey half-turns and sees her pirate friend. It is dark, but his face is lit eerily from below by the glowing stone around his neck. “Here,” he calls and lobs something at her. She snatches it easily from the air. The wood handle is perfectly smooth under her hand as she turns back towards her opponent and rams the point through his chest. 

Her stalker joins her by the pile of dust as they contemplate it in silence for a moment. His funny pendant shines like the sun and the eye-patch makes his face look hard, but when he smiles she can see the dork from the yearbook photo. “So,” he says, “I guess we can skip the lecture on vampires.”


	5. Hailey Thinks About Destiny

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hailey has waffles and a series of conversations about destiny.

It’s deja vu all over again, Hailey thinks as she watches the other officers file in. There’s Major Castleman, her C.O., General Hammond, the base commander, Colonel O’Neill, his second, and Doctor Fraiser, the chief medical officer. They are here, once again, to discuss Hailey and the weirdness that is now her life. They have a lot to talk about like the superpowers she’s been hiding, the existence of vampires, and the fact that she’s apparently destined to fight them. It’s all a lot to swallow, and some days Hailey has a hard time believing it herself. It should be a fun briefing. She figures she’ll be lucky to avoid a section 8.

*****

It had all come to a head at an all night IHOP two nights before. Hailey and her one-eyed stranger had gone there immediately after she’d slain that vampire. They’d had a lot to talk about, but once they had ordered they had sat in awkward silence instead.

“So, who are you?” Hailey asked as soon as the waitress had finished delivering Hailey’s waffles and his coffee. She already knew his name after running his plates, but she knew next to nothing about the man she was sharing a booth with. How did he know about vampires? Why had he been following her?

“My name is Xander Harris,” he introduced himself. “I’m with the Watchers Council.”

“Watchers Council?” Hailey asked casually as she poured flavored syrup over her already strawberries and whip cream covered waffles. She tried not to look or sound it, but she was worried. It sounded ominous. What did they watch? Her?

“Yeah, I know,” he said with a grimace. “I keep telling Giles we need to change to something a little less stalker-licious, but apparently that name has centuries of tradition behind it so...” Harris shrugged and took a sip of his coffee.

“Okay,” Hailey said slowly. She wondered if he were psychic or if people were usually troubled by the name. “And how do you know about vampires?”

“I’m from Sunnydale,” he told her as though it was an answer.

“I know that.” Hailey was getting a little irritated. “What does that have to do with vampires?”

“Wait. You do?”

“I ran your plates,” she told him smugly.

“Oh.” Harris seemed momentarily at a loss. “Well, what you may not know is that Sunnydale is” –a look of pain flitted across his face– “was vamp capital USA. Also, killing vampires? Pretty much what the Council is all about.”

Well, that answered that. “So you fight vampires and you were following me why?”

“There’s no easy way to tell you this so” –he took a deep breath– “you’re a Slayer.”

“I’m an 80's thrasher band.”

Harris smiled briefly at that. “I could give you the whole one girl speech, but that’s long and boring and hasn’t been true for a while. Short version: you’re not like other girls. Since May, you’ve been stronger and faster. Maybe you’ve been attacked before, and you might have had some weird dreams. Either way, you’re different.”

Hailey felt the thrill of fear. “How did you know that?”

Harris touched the pendant of his necklace. “It glows and heats up whenever a Slayer’s around. As the for the May thing? Well, it’s sort of our fault.”

“Your fault? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s a long story,” he hedged.

“I’ve got all night and a plate full of waffles,” Hailey pointed out. Harris just nodded and told her about the last days of Sunnydale.

By the time Harris finished his story, Hailey’s plate was clear except for a sticky film of syrup and the single bite of waffle that had been on the fork for the last five minutes. It was all a bit too much to swallow. The source of all evil fighting school guidance councilors and construction workers in Southern California? Maybe the First was some sort of rogue ascended being trying to make a name for himself, but why Sunnydale? As for the final battle, they called that a plan? Sure, it evidently saved the world, and the sudden influx of Slayer strength probably saved Hailey and her team, but still. “What the hell were you people thinking?”

“Mostly, ‘Oh God. We’re all gonna die,’” Harris admitted. “The world was ending and we were pretty much out of ideas other than the old humus standby.”

Hailey nodded. She understood, well, not the humus part, but the crazy stuff you do to save the planet. In the name of desperation, the folks at the SGC, mostly SG1, had done everything from strapping an open stargate to an experimental jet to blowing up a sun. They hadn’t always thought things through either. So Harris’ people may have given an unknown number of young women superpowers, the SGC had managed to start an intergalactic war.

“So now what?” Hailey asked. “What do you want?”

“Well, in a perfect world” –Harris paused to reconsider– “Actually, in a perfect world we wouldn’t need Slayers or Air Force officers. Anyway, the point is, we’re responsible and we owe you a heads up about monsters and stuff. And, if you wanted to work for us, then yay!” He gave her a double thumbs up.

“Work for you?”

“Slaying vampires and making the world safe for puppies and non-denominational winter holidays of your choice. But I understand you have a prior commitment.”

“Do you? Do you really?” Everything about him, from his hair to his posture, told Hailey that the closest he’d ever been to a uniform was dress-up at Halloween. How could this flippant civilian really understand what the Air Force meant to her?

Harris’s pleasant smile disappeared, and when he spoke again his voice was cold. “I’ve been doing this since I was 15. I’ve lost friends, lovers, my home and my left eye and I’ve never once got paid. I know about commitment.” He made a visible effort to calm down. “The point is, if you want to be top gun or keep playing tic-tac-toe with Joshua or whatever you do at that mountain, I get it.”

“It’s deep space radar telemetry,” Hailey told him primly.

“Right,” he drawled before calling for the bill.

As they headed for their cars, Harris turned to her. “Here,” he said and tossed her a stake. “You’re gonna need this.”

“I never said I was going to work for you,” Hailey pointed out, but kept hold of the weapon.

“Better safe than sorry, and you can’t say it didn’t come in handy tonight. Look” –he put his had on her shoulder– “all I know is that you’re a warrior. Whether it’s with us or the Air Force I don’t care. Just remember, like Spiderman says, great power, great responsibility, so don’t go robbing banks.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. “You want to join up, you need help or you just want to talk, give me a call.” Then he headed to his car and drove off into the night.

Silence reigns in the briefing room now that Hailey has finished telling the other officers all about Harris, vampires and her own superpowers. Dr. Fraiser is staring at her like she’s about to call the men with white coats and butterfly nets. Hailey can sympathize. They may have had some pretty wild stuff happen at the SGC over the years, but vampires were a bit much.

“Okay,” Colonel O’Neill breaks the silence. “That’s weird.” Hailey frowns. That’s pretty rich coming from a guy who takes tactical advice from dead people.

“Weird?” Fraiser’s tone says that doesn’t begin to cover it.

“Strange, bizarre, crazy–”

“True.”

“–Loony...what?” The Colonel breaks off and joins the rest of the table in staring at the general.

“Sir?” Clearly the good doctor is starting to wonder if insanity is catching.

General Hammond folds his hands and sighs. “A number of years ago, I was asked to review a top secret project. I can’t discuss the details, but suffice to say, vampires are very real, and so is the Slayer.” Everyone takes a few minutes to process that. Suddenly Hailey isn’t so crazy and their safe, normal earth isn’t so safe or normal anymore.

“So, what now, sir?” demands Major Castleman. “Vampires are real and Hailey is destined to fight them, so we just let her go?” He does not sound pleased at the prospect of her leaving.

“Lieutenant Hailey is a valuable member of this command.” General Hammond doesn’t answer the question.

“Yes, sir, she is,” Castleman says. “Lieutenant Hailey is a brilliant scientist and an excellent soldier, and that was before she could bend steel. We can’t just give that up because she’s supposedly destined to fight monsters.”

“Permission to speak freely.” The general nods his consent, and Hailey is grateful. As flattering as the Major’s little speech was, being talked about instead of to is more than a little annoying. “I appreciate your concern, sir, but unless the general plans on ordering me to join the Council as an Air Force liaison, this is my choice.”

“Evil aliens or the evil undead. It’s a tough call,” snarks Colonial O’Neill.

“Not really, sir,” Hailey tells him. “This job has wormholes.”

Major Castleman beams like Christmas just came early and even O’Neill smiles a little. “Ah, yes, science,” he says with the long-suffering tones of someone who has worked with a few too many scientists.

“Yes, sir, science,” Hailey tells him with a smile. “It’s more than that though. I worked long and hard for my education, my rank and this posting. Destiny made me a superhero, but I made me an officer. Some else can kill vampires; I’ll stick with my evil aliens.”


End file.
